Growth Spurt

A few days ago, Miss Nora Bean went through a rough patch. She was eating way more than usual (8 oz in three hours at one point!) and fussing like crazy. She also refused to sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time, and then only while being held. Given how sweet she usually is, my first thought was that someone had kidnapped my child and replaced her with some kind of wolverine/howler monkey hybrid. Fortunately, whatever was bothering her seems to have been temporary. Two days after she started fussing, she abruptly stopped, and now her smile is just as broad and lovely as it was a few days earlier.

As best we can tell, she must have been going through some kind of developmental growth spurt. New neural connection apparently take a lot out of a baby. We've seen some improvement in a couple of areas--things she'd already been doing sometimes that she now does all the time. In particular, her vision seems to have had a big jump. She loves stripes and other bold patterns, even when they're not black and white. She can track objects easily, both with her head and with her eyes alone. She seems to be able to see us from a longer distance than she could before, and she can definitely see when we're smiling at her. Her motor skills are also improving, though not as dramatically. She is still working on keeping her head up. She desperately wants more head control. Head control = baby freedom! All of this is boosted by increasing periods of alert wakefulness. She is now awake long enough that I've started to think of her as napping when she sleeps--before, she just slept all the time.

She's also grown. A lot. She's clearly turning all that milk into more baby. She's long and lean--like a string bean. A string bean with GIGANTIC feet.